This from Susan B. Glasser’s New Yorker story on the Secretary of State:
- This gets at a central challenge of Pompeo’s tenure: turning Trump’s tweets and “instincts” into a coherent foreign policy, as his policy-planning chief often put it.
Those darn possessive pronouns.
I don’t know whose “his” is.
Whose policy-planning chief are we talking about? Pompeo’s? Trump’s? I’m lost.
I’ve tried scanning back to the beginning of the paragraph, and then reading on to the end of the paragraph, but I still can’t figure it out.
This gets at a central challenge of our complicated English language: turning possessive pronouns into coherent communication.
When it comes to pronouns, go isolationist: Avoid, avoid, avoid.
